Sending hidden fields via POST in iPhone in-app email

Question

I'm letting my App's user send email from within the app to share some content on myserver. To do so I need to include a button with two bits of data and I want to use POST to keep it somewhat hidden. I've decided to add an html form using POST and two hidden fields in the email rather, like so:

NSString *buttonCode = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"<form method='post' action='http://www.example.com/iphone/nifty.php'&gt;
 <input type='hidden' name='dataOne' value='%@'>
 <input type='hidden' name='dataTwo' value='%@'>
 <input type='submit'value='Submit'></form>",dataOne, dataTwo];
NSString *emailBody = [NSString stringWithFormat:
        @"<b>%@ - %@</b>\n\n<HR WIDTH=200 SIZE=2 COLOR=#755f0f ALIGN=CENTER>\n Here is a email:<br><br>%@", 
         dateString, 
         timeString,
         buttonCode];
[picker setMessageBody:emailBody isHTML:YES];

I've confirmed by looking at the raw source of the email that the form is constructed correctly and I've copied and pasted it into a web page and it works.

So here is the problem. When I click on the button in the received email (using apple's mail client) the dataOne and dataTwo variables don't get passed to my server.

Is there a better way to do this or is the issue with my mail client?

====== update ==========

I think this may be related to the line the iPhone adds to the email:

--Apple-Mail-1--23863057 Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

When I add enctype="text/html" to the form in the test html on the server as mentioned above the variables are not received.

Is there a way to alter this from the iPhone and send it another way?

Answer 1

The enctype just tells the mail client that the email contains HTML, the problem is that your mail client is dropping the fields.